I am attempting to build a games sales site and looking for advice from anybody who might have some experience with building commerce sites and selling games online. I have development experience; however, I am going to be the sole person managing and developing this site for now. I am looking for a means to quickly develop the site so that I might focus my attentions on other matters.

The purpose of the site will be more about focusing on connecting buyers and sellers rather than actually selling the product (similar to gamestaq).

Ultimately, I am seeking a solution that is free (or relatively cheap), has a cart built in with payment processing (or an easy add-on), and preferably some way of automating product descriptions. Finally, they must have some form of customization (required coding is fine) for at least small changes such as displaying multiple sources to buy a product from on the same page.

Currently, I am looking into Wordpress and their various shopping cart plugins. Most of them meet my first two requirements; however, they still seemingly require a fairly manual entry of product descriptions. This seems entirely too time consuming for the large number of products I wish to display since I have many other tasks and I would like an instant collection as soon as the site launches.

In this vain, I have considered amazon associates to at least automate the descriptions since amazon has excellent descriptions and service from my experience; however, I am worried that I would not have the flexibility to display other purchasing options beside the amazon descriptions. Furthermore, using Amazon for the descriptions may lead to confusion and purchases from Amazon and not the other sellers.

*Phew*, deep breath. Sorry for the long post but it is quite complicated to explain. You don't necessarily have to be a developer to comment as maybe I am simply taking the wrong approach. Any ideas you have are greatly appreciated.

I can't help you because I don't know a yota about these things and I don't even know what you're talking about. But I would like you to clarify things.

What is the connection between you being a developer and selling games in online retail?

And what's the purpose of a site that "connects buyers and sellers rather than sells the product"? What is that?

If the solution requires coding in order to modify I can do that. I was just indicating that I didn't need the solution to hold my hand as much as I do to make the process faster.

As for the sites purpose. I don't intend to carry any of the products myself, rather I intend to simplify the seller's process of listing the item for sale (pre-scripted product description, transaction handling) and ensuring a fixed price instead of using auctions or allowing customers to specify it like amazon.

The site I mentioned (gamestaq) has one price that they call a fair-market price that all sellers charge. This allows sellers to have a decent price while still allowing buyers to save. My site will have a unique, but similar business model that will hopefully allow for even better selling points for both buyers and sellers.

Will you be typing the product descriptions yourself? Well, obviously the raw material is copy-pasted from publisher material, but will you personally edit the final text?

I'm hoping to avoid even copy-pasting. I would like to feature hundreds of games to start and continue expanding. i think I'll have larger responsibilities than entering descriptions manually, like promoting, accounting, and expanding the site's features. The final text will likely not be edited.

Aha, so that's what wordpress or Amazon associates is for? (among other things)

This all seems so complicated to me lol, what modern retailing has become.

In my imaginary world an online retailer orders a bunch of games from a distributor and then types the info about them into an Excel sheet and just posts it on the website lol.

Yeah, well this would be a lot simpler if I were just purchasing from a wholesaler; however, that requires a great deal of investment capital, not to mention that the advent of ebay and amazon has made it extremely difficult to compete.

Amazon actually allows you to create a store with their automated software where you can either sell your own or their products and it handles the details for you; however, I'm positive it doesn't allow you to sell other's products and it requires you to have the products beforehand.

I could also write my own software specifically to handle product descriptions (it could scrape amazon's site and then populate a database); however, once again that requires the initial coding. I was hoping someone already knew an application that had these features in mind.

Thanks though, I'm probably just overthinking this.

I don't think you are overthinking it.

It's interesting that a big trend in business lately are all these middle-ware solutions who specialize in services. Instead of launching a site that simply sells the end product they launch a service that guides the consumer in finding the right products (or guides the seller at some level of the distribution chain, but as a regular consumer I seldom get to see that end of it).

It's probably the only way as a newcomer to compete with the already established and with the giants.

There's much less risk that way. All you end up losing in the long run is your time. Plus it makes for a much more agile business model that can shift to meet future needs. Furthermore, it offsets some of the leg work to the ones seeking the service.

There are still risks involved I'm sure, which I'll likely find out. This will be my first venture into my own business.

It kind of started recently when I started working for store credit at a local used game store. My hope was that i could work for enough store credit to buy items and sell them back at a reasonable enough price online to make it worth my while as a job (I have other reasons why I didn't want to pursue an actual job).

I quickly discovered how difficult it is to get a reasonable price even when you're getting your products free, let alone when you are buying them even wholesale. Furthermore, I talked to the owner of the store and found out he was only 26 and started his store at the age of 21. He now has two local stores in only five years and the largest selection in town.

So I thought to myself; if he can do it at 21, I can do it at 26. From there, I started considering my own unique skill set and how I would go about it and I decided on an online approach (since I majored in computer science). I also thought about the general direction that the market is heading. With digital distribution taking a larger share of the physical market I decided that whatever idea I came up with had to be flexible enough to meet the changing demands and not risk falling flat on its face if the used market dies out in the next five to ten years.

Interesting!

Your work at that used game store, was it cleric work? But you didn't get paid in cash, you got paid in games (store credits)?

The bold: what do you mean it was difficult? Difficult to get a good price when you sell individual games at Craigslist or Ebay, or?